SOURCE: Introduction to The Black Prophet by William Carleton, Woodstock Books, 1996

In the following essay, Kelly investigates how the socio-political and religious atmosphere in which William Carleton was raised affected his writing.

'There never was', claims William Carleton in his uncompleted Autobiography, 'any man of letters who had an opportunity of knowing and describing the manners of the Irish people so thoroughly as I had.' This is a boast that critics have been happy to accept, with two qualifications: for 'Irish people' he should have written 'Irish peasantry', and the manners he described were those that flourished before the Great Famine of 1845-48. That famine, which was to alter forever Irish social, cultural and, eventually, political life, was already beginning when Carleton took up his pen in the spring of 1846 to write the first instalment of The Black Prophet for the Dublin University Magazine, a fact that...